All Posts Tagged Tag: ‘Asteroid Belt’

Considering just how many asteroids there are in the asteroid belt, it can be difficult to come up with acceptable names for all of them. So, they are given obscure provisional names until a naming organization can bestow names on select celestial bodies. Most named asteroids are named after astronomers themselves, or the relatives of astronomers. This week, Wikimedia announced …

Astronomers this week announced that they have discovered what could be an asteroid belt around the star Vega. NASA‘s Spitzer space telescope and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory were used to observe the star, which is the second brightest in the northern sky. Vega was found to have an astroid belt-like band of debris in both a …

A new study shows that planets like Earth could be rare if they depend on asteroid belts of a specific mass range. Researchers suggested that the size and location of a solar system’s asteroid belt could determine whether complex life can evolve on an Earth-like planet. “Our study shows that only a tiny fraction of planetary systems observed to date …